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Comment by hw | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to gauge a person's qualities from a resume. Things like culture fit (extremely important IMO), fast thinker, quick learner - are all aspects that can't be garnered from a resume. IMO, resumes are only a decent filter for experience, and provides a baseline for the interview.

There are many I've interviewed that padded their resumes and said they are experienced in something they really aren't, and there are some who dont have much experience but are smart and quick learners.

Without a resume, what else can we go with when it comes to hiring? In my career, the best hires have always been from two sources:

- someone i've worked with and trust before

- someone who was recommended by someone i worked with and trust before

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This doesn't allow for new people to enter the system, like new college graduates. While hiring within the circle is great for consistency, it also means you may be missing out on great talent. At fast enough growth rates, you'll quickly tap out on the friends-of-friends network and will need a solid plan for hiring unknowns.

I think you hit the nail on the head here and probably why so many engineering jobs are gained through personal referrals instead of cold resumes. I know that's how I got hired at most of the companies I've worked at.

The company I work at building a way to capture those recommendations and that concept of trust through peer-to-peer reviews: https://www.roikoi.com/

The site asks you to play a anonymously game comparing your most relevant coworkers to one another and a users' score is generated by their aggregate results from their coworkers playing the game. It essentially crowdsources gauging those qualities that can't be gathered from a resume.

Sounds like it'd be hard to get statistical relevance in most companies...

The nice thing about ROIKOI (disclaimer: I also work there) is that we don't need all signals to be from your current company. We get signals from previous companies, people you've gone to school with, and people you may know in your city.

All of the leaderboards for the companies that I worked for are all top notch folks I would hire in a heartbeat, so so far our output has been fantastic.

Are you hiring right now?

I wrote exactly these two tags "fast thinker" / "quick learner" in my CV / cover letter / LinkedIn profile and I removed them a few months later because from my experience it looks like they drive recruiters away or scare them.

I can only speak for myself but terms like that set off my BS meter and probably make me think at least marginally less of whoever sticks them on their resume. They're vague and unquantifiable. They're of a class with words like acclaimed, industry-leading, and so forth in copy describing products.

Yes, for that reason I took it off, still the question is how can one communicate that one is? Should you write "constantly programmed faster and leaner and with less errors that his colleagues?". I don't think there is a way to communicate this but I still think it matters.

You can easily determine if some one is a BS guy in a technical interview anyway, so I don't think, BSers are very frequent in IT and much less so in programming.

Results, achievements, accomplishments. Frankly I don't really care if you were better than the guy in the next cube. He might be an idiot or a complete slacker.

And I'm not sure I wouldn't get negative vibes from someone who felt they had to position themselves by de-positioning the people they worked with.

>You can easily determine if some one is a BS guy in a technical interview anyway, so I don't think, BSers are very frequent in IT and much less so in programming.

Of course they're frequent. They are everywhere.

Also, those terms don't contain a signal. Anyone can say they're a fast thinker or a quick learner.

What do you think about the writing sample idea in the article? Doesn't seem crazy to me.

Great... if you're hiring writers. Writing skill is uncorrelated with everything else. I'm a great writer. Many engineers I admire and respect are not.

I've got no magic bullet. Hiring people you know is good, and I strongly recommend informal face-to-face interviews. Two of the best interviews I've ever had (one where I was the interviewer, the other where I was the interviewee) were mostly about language design, which turns out to be a really revealing topic for discovering attitudes about process, standards, and software design generally.

But how to screen people in the pipeline so you can avoid interviewing everyone who applies? No idea.

Is it actually uncorrelated with everything else? I think it's worth investigating (and I hope the addendum at the top of her article means that she will let us know how it works out!) In my experience great engineers who are bad writers definitely exist, but are more the exception than the rule.

I think having the candidate speak to his favorite project or past work is a great gauge of passion and communication skills. I always ask that, albeit in the face to face interview. It might be good to bump that step further up the funnel, but a lot of 'passion' gets lost in translation when it comes to writing vs talking.

I hate to talk on the phone (aka talk without seeing the other person) so I hate phone screening.

To complicate the situation, most of phone screenings I did were made by young recruiters that don't understand anything of what they are asking about, making all this thing silly and awkward. A skype interview is much more relevant but probably scary for the (non technical) recruiter.

By the other hand if I can get a face to face interview, normally I'm in.

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